Foreground Justice

This installation was designed in response to a call for proposals for a public art work to be housed on the grounds of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Inspired by Radcliffe’s legacy as a center for equity and inclusion, the work, titled A Tree Grows Somewhere Else, was designed to call attention to one of our great contemporary inequities: environmental injustice. The project proposed using a majority of the competition’s budget to create a landscape intervention in a community historically burdened by pollution and a lack of open space. This intervention would then be recorded on the institute’s grounds in a monochromatic installation that features images of the plants used off-site. These large-scale panels would be positioned in the same arrangement as their respective plantings off-site, thus being a reflection of the work taking place outside the university’s walls. Thus two distinct spaces are created that are inextricably linked. Each site has different goals and a different audience, but both installations are meant to draw attention to a stark inequality, not just by announcing it, but by putting its proverbial money where its proverbial mouth is.

Map of Cambridge and the potential redistribution of planted open space from the Harvard campus to the nearby Wellington-Harrington neighborhood

Rendering of the installation at Radcliffe Yard, creating a flexible public space amid images of the trees planted off-site.

Potential transformation of open lot beside Webster Auto Body

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